Why You Should Consider Hiring an Online Reputation Management Company

My webinar this week is titled “12 Surefire Ways to Protect Your Reputation While Promoting Your Business”. I invite you to attend this webinar on Wednesday, December 5th at 2pm Eastern, but if you’d like a little insight on just one of the topics that will be covered, then keep reading.

I’ve been saying this all along, but it bear repeating here that social media can be a small business owner’s best marketing tool if used properly. However, social media can also be your worst enemy. Pete Blackshaw said it best: “Satisfied customers tell three friends, angry customers tell 3,000.”

So how can you protect your online reputation when your customers have that kind of power? There are a few easy steps to making sure that you don’t have angry customers spouting off on Facebook about how terrible your business is. I’m not going to address your product or service, because if either of those truly is terrible, then you have issues that I can’t fix.

Assuming you do have superior products and/or services, and assuming there is no way even the best company can please every customer, here are a couple of things you can do to lessen or even use that bad press to your advantage.

Make sure you address any concerns expressed about your company on social media in that venue. For example, if someone checks in at your business with a comment about how long they had to wait for service, ideally you would have someone respond within that business day about how there has been a surge in popularity of your business, you are in the process of hiring more staff and invite them to come back for some kind of special offer.

Never remove negative posts from your social media properties. That can actually do more harm than good since people will then stop posting on your page and will instead post on their own page where you may not be able to monitor it. By welcoming feedback on your pages and responding directly to the criticism, you can actually gain social media points.

But how can you monitor these things and still run your business? If I was a customer that was upset about my service, Tweeted about it, and then got a reply to that Tweet before I actually received service, I would assume that your employees are spending all day on social media and not doing their actual job.

So is hiring a social media management company the answer? It may be, particularly if you are more interested in making sure that there is someone monitoring your properties during business hours so any possible issues that might be posted can be caught and addressed right away. A skilled social media manager or online reputation management company is capable of turning potentially ruinous negative campaigns into a win for the company and can even turn that formerly angry customer into a brand ambassador.